A little over a week ago I published my latest post on the DemandGen (r)Evolution blog – “Dreamforce 2010: Demand Generation Insights ‘from the Cloud’” – a round-up of my takeaways from this year’s Salesforce.com Dreamforce event in San Francisco.

For those of you who are not familiar with Dreamforce, you might be asking, ‘Why a write-up on what is (at a surface level) merely a technology user conference? What’s the takeaway for marketers?’

Source: Salesforce.com

An obvious initial response is that Salesforce.com has emerged as one of the dominant – and one of the fastest-growing – CRM platforms in the marketplace. That alone earns it some attention.

But beyond this, as I note in my post, “Dreamforce increasingly has grown into the annual host of two critical, interdependent and growing ecosystems – and consequently was an event filled with great demand generation insights. … On one hand, Salesforce.com serves as the cornerstone for a growing software ecosystem around buyer-centric, demand management software. … On the other hand, Salesforce.com has become the leader in cloud-based application infrastructure. … [And] it is this cloud-based approach that also is critical to enabling [this] demand management software ecosystem … .”

Dreamforce also is a unique annual event as there doesn’t seem to be any “… other technology-based event that draws such a large group of sales and marketing executives – and the technology vendors that serve them – in one place, at one time for nearly a full week,” as I comment in the blog post. In fact, “Some of my best conversations each year occur at Dreamforce, and this year was no different.”

So what were my major takeaways? The blog post focuses on two major demand generation insights:

“B2B buyer insight is more-pervasive, more real-time and more-accessible via ‘the cloud,’ and marketers must learn to leverage this dynamic asset.

“Our role as marketers must focus more than ever on delivering leadership and visibility to help our organizations tune their demand generation machines and to ensure tight coupling with revenue outcomes.”

I also have embedded in this post a link to my Dreamforce interview w/ the DreamSimplicity video crew in which I talk more about the new impetus for ‘marketing in the cloud.’